Systemwide text-replacement-feature

Desktop
1

Gnome should get a systemwide text-replacement-feature like MacOS:
It would be very handy, if you can define combinations of 2 or 3 letters, that are replaced with a predefined text-snippet, each type you type them followed by a TAB-key.

That is a very useful feature of MacOS, that makes recurring text-inputs faster and easier to type.

And it would be even better than in MacOS, if this feature also supports line-breaks.

2

“GNOME” cannot do much; unlike Apple, the Linux desktop does not have a single compositor, a single toolkit, and a single application development platform.

At most, you can get something through the input method infrastructure; for instance, see: GitHub - ibus/ibus: Intelligent Input Bus for Linux/Unix

3

Thank you for this information. But I think, if this isn’t possible today, the work should be done to make this possible in the future. Because if Linux should not only be a server-system, but a desktop-system for the masses, comfort-features like this are needed.

4

It is possible using ibus-typing-booster.

5

It’s great to hear, that this is technically viable. I really hope, this will be added in the near future of Gnome.

And to make it perfect, it should also be possible to insert not only line-breaks, but also the content of the clipboard on a certain position and to define, where the cursor should be located.

An example for an use-case:
I often have to reply to many people - sometimes in a word-processor or editor, other times in different mail-software and the next time in a web-frontend in different browsers.

It would be easy, if a shortcut like e.g.

dmr

would be replaced by (special input in square brackets)

Dear Mr. [clipboard],[linebreak]
[linebreak]
[cursor][linebreak]
[linebreak]
Best regards,[linebreak]
MyName

So that I can start typing directly on the cursor position without positioning the cursor by hand and that I don’t have to type all the rest manually every time. And then I get:

Dear Mr. RECIPIENT-FROM-CLIPBOARD,

TEXT

Best reagrs,
MyName

(And the same with

dms

for a female recipient:

Dear Mrs. (and so on)

)

And I’m sure, there are many more usecases, where this feature would be very useful to make things easier and faster.

And yes:
I know, that many mail-clients offer templates or that there are e.g. Thunderbird-Plugins, that offer exactly this features (and even more). But to have this systemwide in every mail-client, every webbrowser, every editor and every word-processor, you need this feature integrated into the system on system-level.

This would be a productivity-feature, that would let Gnome stick out.

6

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